Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 Read online

  “Which this witness is qualified to make,” the prosecutor argued.

  “Overruled,” the judge agreed.

  “Yeah,” said a stockman who worked for Mack Parker at a hardware chain store in Raleigh. “He’s got a short fuse, and he’d go off like a rocket if Felicia ever answered him back. She was a real lady, but Mack said he wouldn’t have married her except that he wasn’t going to let his family tell him what to do.”

  “Did he ever speak of divorce?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Not really. He said it would be admitting that he’d made a mistake.”

  “Did he say anything about her miscarriage last year?”

  “Just that her crying got on his nerves.”

  “We were out on our side porch,” said the next-door neighbor. “The lights were on over there and we saw him come storming past the kitchen window. We heard glass breaking and them yelling and then we heard him smack her and—”

  “Objection, Your Honor.”

  “Sustained.”

  “Okay,” said the neighbor. “We heard what sounded like a smack and then we heard what sounded like her crying. That’s when I called nine-one-one.”

  “It looked like a slaughterhouse,” said the patrol officer who had responded that night. “Her lip was split, there were superficial cuts on her arms and legs, and she was bleeding like a stuck pig. Broken glass. Tomatoes all over the floor and wall. I thought at first it was blood, too. She wouldn’t let us arrest him, though. She said she’d accidentally knocked over the jars, then slipped on the mess and cut herself and that’s why they were upset and yelling at each other.”

  “And you believed her?”

  “No, sir, but she wasn’t the one who called in the complaint, so I couldn’t arrest him.”

  “No, it’s not that we thought he’d done away with her when he first reported her missing,” said the sheriff’s detective, “but we always look closely at the spouse in cases like these. We found her blood in the kitchen and some more on a tank top and shorts in the laundry hamper, but that could be explained by the broken glass jars the night before. It did not explain how her blood got in the trunk of his car.”

  “Was anything missing from the house?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Yessir. A six-by-eight rug in the entryway.”

  “How big was Felicia Parker, Detective?”

  “Everyone describes her as about five-three and small-boned.”

  “Could she have been rolled up in that rug?”

  “Objection!” cried the defense attorney.

  The defense attorney was sympathetic. “Mr. Parker, you admit that you were occasionally violent with your wife, yet you insisted on testifying. Why?”

  “Because I didn’t kill her. She was fine when I went to bed. I told her she had to clean up that mess in the kitchen before she could come to bed herself, but she didn’t. She must’ve just walked out of the house.”

  “Without taking any of her clothes?”

  “She could’ve taken some. Who looks at his wife’s clothes? And she did take that rug and my money.”

  “Ah, yes. Your money,” the prosecutor said on cross-examination. “Almost two thousand in cash that no one ever heard you mention. She just walks away with a rug over her small shoulder. No clothes, no toothbrush, no purse, just blood in your car trunk. Where’d you dump her body, Mr. Parker?”

  “Don’t worry,” said the defense attorney. “A jury doesn’t like to convict without a body. That’s why the D.A. didn’t ask for the death penalty.”

  “Mr. Foreman,” said the judge. “Have you reached a verdict?”

  “We have, Your Honor. On the charge of murder in the second-degree, we find the defendant guilty.”

  Three years later: Central Prison

  “I’m sorry, Mack,” said Parker’s attorney. “The appeals court says there was no error in your trial. Keep on keeping your nose clean and you could get paroled in ten years.”

  Six years later: New Mexico

  The stockman who had once worked for Parker was now a manager in a different hardware chain. He paused in the doorway to watch his small son push a toy truck around the Zapotec rug, a family heirloom that she had refused to leave behind even though shipping it here to his hometown had cost almost as much as her bus ticket.

  The anonymous bus trip had been his idea. Touching her finger to her wounds and then dabbing blood on the mat of Mack’s car trunk had been hers.

  “Mama? Daddy’s home!” their son called, but she was already coming down the hall with their baby daughter on one slender hip, a cold beer for him in her free hand, and a loving smile on her beautiful soft lips.

  Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Maron

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  Fiction

  Icarus

  by C. J. Harper

  C. J. Harper is the pseudonym of Plymouth, Minnesota, lawyer Charlie Rethwisch. His three previous stories for us all featured 1950s P.I. Darrow Nash. In 2009, the author was highly commended by the committee for Britain’s Debut Dagger Award for his as yet unpublished Nash novel. The judges particularly praised the book’s likable protagonist and “sexy 1950s Hollywood setting.” We hope that novel will be bought for U.S. publication soon. In the meantime, here’s a non-series C. J. Harper tale.

  The complete journal entries of professor james enright:

  Icarus is coming for me.

  I can feel it.

  Can sense it.

  It’s not paranoia.

  I know he’s coming.

  Because he knows I can see what he does. Can see the results of his depravity. The results of his madness.

  Icarus is coming for me.

  I am a psychic.

  It is not a gift.

  This is how it starts:

  I see the body from above. From the vantage point of God.

  At that moment, I know only two things: that I am awake and in bed. Nothing else has had time to register.

  That is how it starts.

  That is when the vision comes.

  The first one:

  The body is sprawled facedown on the rocks along the Mississippi River beneath the Short Line Railroad Bridge. The scene is dark, but an ambient glow from the city lights, refracted down by the overcast sky, brings out a human shape on the rocks. The head is bare and balding and turned to the side, the white, stubbled hair stark against a backdrop of black-looking blood. The pants are dark. The legs are in the position of a rock climber in mid step, one straight down and one bent as if lifting for a toehold. Thick-soled athletic shoes cover feet pointed in opposite directions. The shirt is white with vertical stripes and is untucked. Elbows jut out below arms sprawled over the head. Dark lines encircle the wrists like bracelets. Even from this height, a single word is visible: “Hunter.”

  My eyes blink open. My heart hammers against my chest. Sweat stipples my forehead and upper lip. It takes me a moment to get my bearings. To calm down. To realize that what I’ve seen wasn’t in front of me. Had only played out in my mind.

  The memory of a dream.

  The digital clock on the bedside table reads 3:28 A.M. Its characters are vivid. Blood red.

  I’m lying on my back in my double bed, the tan sheet and burgundy bedspread in a pile on the floor. My legs are splayed, my arms bent above my head in the shape of a broken halo. My back aches as if I’ve slept wrong. My head is turned to the side. My posture reminds me of what I’ve just seen in my mind’s eye, that of a man who has fallen from a high place.

  Fallen to his death.

  It isn’t until later that I begin to understand what I’ve seen.

  What I am.

  The psychic I’ve become.

  In the four weeks since that morning in early April, I have developed a fear of waking. Of finding myself lying in bed in that fallen condition, in that moment between reality and dream, between the conscious and the subconscious.

  I fear that moment
when I see the aftermath of Icarus.

  See the body of his latest victim.

  In the four weeks since that first sighting, I have woken that way four times. And four bodies have been found. Right where I told Detective Phelps they would be.

  I fight sleep.

  Am exhausted nearly to the point of delirium.

  To the point of madness.

  The circles under my eyes are the shade of bruises. When darkness falls, a dread bears down on my heart with the gravity of shackles. I try to stay awake to avoid what I don’t want to see, but my exhaustion drags me into a deep, dark sleep.

  A sleep of density.

  The sleep of death.

  “ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come . . .”

  Hamlet knew.

  For all his weaknesses, Hamlet knew.

  I miss Denise and McKenna.

  This curse of seeing beyond my senses never followed me before their deaths. My life before that first day of August, 2007, was one of hope, built on the naive belief that there was—is—a purpose and a destiny to life.

  That balance does not splinter.

  That music does not die.

  That bridges do not fall.

  Eight months later, only a simmering rage has attempted to fill the chasm of loss and hopelessness that has hollowed out my soul. Rage at a world that goes blindly on. Blind to the devastation wrought on a single soul. Focused instead on the inanity of television and the Internet. On the banality of celebrity. On the meaninglessness of sports.

  People in the grocery store offer their pop psychology on talentless celebrities without taking a moment to analyze themselves and their shallow fixations. They worship emptiness. They worship a culture that, to borrow from Macbeth, is nothing more than “a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing.”

  These people have no concept of the depth of the loss burrowing inside the man standing in line behind them. They are oblivious to the tectonic shift that has left massive fissures in his heart. They are unaware that he could wake up one morning frozen in a fallen and graceless pose and see the death of their loved one before they are told of it. See the devastation that awaits them before their cell phones have begun to ring.

  A number they will not recognize.

  A detective they will soon come to know.

  I fear these psychic visions.

  Yet a part of me revels in the power.

  Of seeing death before others do.

  After they died, I moved from the suburbs to a place known as the Mill District. The birthplace of Minneapolis. Where the Mississippi River tumbles over the Falls of St. Anthony. Where wheat became flour. Where flour became fortunes.

  Only a couple of the mills still stand. Others are gone, or left in ruins. Little more than the jagged edges of stone walls from buildings that once hummed with the energy of milling wheat into flour.

  Of turning one thing into another.

  Many of those mills exploded from the grain dust that had built up inside them. Destroyed by their own unstable breath. By an unforeseen byproduct of their own existence.

  Some of them were rebuilt. Others were left as rubble.

  A place of rebirth and ruin.

  That is why I moved here.

  I knew I’d fit in.

  One way or the other.

  I thought maybe that first vision had just been the vestige of a dream, an illusion of the cruel subconscious that had bled into my perception. But the noon news later that day had led with the story of a missing person, an elderly man, Donald Grayson—white male, age seventy-three, five-eight, 165 pounds, last seen leaving Sidekick’s Bar wearing black jeans and a white Twins jersey. He was a fan of Torii Hunter, the former Minnesota center fielder, and that name was stitched on his back.

  I’d picked up the phone that first day to call the police, but hesitated. What was I calling to report? A dream? A coincidence? Would they think I was a lunatic? Yes. But how could seeing the name “Hunter” be a coincidence?

  Someone was missing a family member.

  Someone was about to understand.

  I dialed 911. Told the woman who answered what I’d seen. Where they might find Donald Grayson’s body.

  When Denise and McKenna died, time stopped.

  I lost track of the months after their deaths. The days, the endless hours of darkness when I was afraid to sleep—almost as afraid as I am now. But back then, I didn’t fear visions. I feared dreams.

  New, unlived, frighteningly real dreams. Wishful dreams of scenes of a life I would never have with them. Scenes of a secret life played out under the cover of sleep.

  I feared the disorientation of waking from those dreams. Waking to find that it had all been an illusion. A vanished, vanquished dream.

  A lie born from the inherent cruelty of the subconscious.

  Was I punishing myself? For what? For not saving them? For not dying with them?

  I lost track of time. Time I’d measured by other people’s lives.

  When Denise was due home from work.

  When McKenna was due home from school.

  When I had to be home for dinner if I was out on my bike.

  When McKenna had to turn off the TV if it was a school night.

  When Denise and I would go to bed.

  When Denise and I would make love.

  An hour after I dialed 911 that first time there was a knock at my door. Two men in tired suits standing on my front stoop.

  “James Enright?” said a tall, thin man in a concrete gray suit. His hair was closely cropped and receding, leaving a black, wispy peninsula that reached down to the top of his forehead. His upper lip protruded slightly over his bottom lip, which made his face look unusually long. His teeth never showed when he talked.

  I opened the door wider. “That’s right.”

  “I’m Detective Phelps.” He turned his torso in the direction of the man standing behind him on the step but kept his eyes on me. “This is Detective Lewis.”

  Where Phelps was maybe fifty, Lewis was no more than thirty, still bearing a youthful pudge on his cheeks. He combed his brown hair straight down. His suit was a slightly darker gray than his partner’s.

  Phelps stuck out his arm as an afterthought. We shook hands like children, weak and awkward.

  “I understand you phoned in a tip this afternoon regarding the whereabouts of a missing person.”

  I nodded. “I know it sounds crazy, but it just came to me. I thought I should call.”

  “May we come in?”

  “Certainly.” My heartbeat quickened. Was I a suspect? When I had called, I hadn’t considered the likely assumption that knowing the location of a body meant I might be the killer. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’d simply called because I thought it was the right thing to do.

  Then again, what did I have to hide?

  I opened the door to let them in.

  Denise and McKenna did not drown.

  They died on solid ground.

  They had just reached the north end of the bridge heading south when the main span gave way, leaving the span they were on with nothing to hold up its south end. That end fell, but the north end held, creating a sudden, sharp incline toward the ground.

  Not a long incline, maybe fifty feet, but nearly vertical.

  The medical examiner determined that they had survived the initial fall—the steep slide down.

  What killed them had come after.

  From above.

  An SUV.

  A semi.

  Other vehicles.

  Other people.

  It wasn’t until I let the detectives in that I first took a good hard look at where I was living. Took the time to see what others saw.

  The outside was three stories of bricks, tall arched windows, and a front stoop. Part of a new building fronted to look like old rowhouses. Rowhouses that had never been a part of the area. Never a part of the true history of the milling district and its skid-row environs of ra
ilroad yards, bars, and flophouses. The rowhouses creating the facade of a mythical time. A mythical place.

  But while the outside was designed to look old, the inside reflected the new.

  Modern.

  Spare.

  So spare that it seemed lifeless. One big open room of concrete and ventilation pipes. It was supposed to look like a loft or converted warehouse, but instead it just looked cold. A hollow imitation.

  The kitchen was open, exposed, marked off by a granite-topped, elongated island and filled with large swatches of stainless steel that covered the refrigerator, dishwasher, and stove. In what passed for the living room, a large television filled one wall opposite a dark green sofa. A green wing chair sat ninety degrees to the sofa and faced the front, curtainless windows.

  The only items out of place with the modern interior were the vestiges of my old life. A Schwinn mountain bike leaning against the wall near the front door. A pair of oak bookcases filled with hardcovers, spines exposed, some standing, some on their sides. The tired green couch and wing chair. A forties-era Baldwin spinet piano. And a tan, square coffee table stained with dark brown water marks and the rainbow spectrum of McKenna’s crayon ticks that had run beyond the edges of the paper. The table that had been her favorite place to color.

  I’d bought the rowhouse before I’d even collected the insurance money. We’d lived in the safety of the suburbs in an Arts and Crafts bungalow.

  The perfect home for a family.

  The worst place to live after your family has died.

  I sold it so fast I hardly remember the closing.

  Or moving out.

  Or moving in.

  The subconscious has a way of blocking those things out.

  I’m a professor at the university. Was. Am still, I guess. Music Department. The dean of the department was kind enough to approve a sabbatical after the bridge collapse. It was his idea. The students needed a teacher. I’d stopped coming in.

  After Denise and McKenna died, there didn’t seem much point to music anymore.

  During that first visit, Phelps settled on the front edge of the wing chair. I sat on the couch. We had to turn our heads to look at each other. We each faced a side of the coffee table, little more now than a receptacle for my debris: a dozen empty bottles of Summit beer, a glass, emerald-green ashtray stuffed with a bloom of short, bent Winstons, and, open but facedown, a book of poems by W.H. Auden. The marks on the table from McKenna’s crayons looked like fading confetti amid the debris.